Despite the Bay Area’s progressive laws on working conditions and pay, the largest racial pay gap among restaurant workers in the nation exists in this region, according to a recent study.

Restaurant workers of color are paid $6.12 less than white workers among fine dining restaurants, indicating that workers of color may be underrepresented in the highest-paying restaurant positions, according to a study from nonprofit organization Restaurant Opportunities Center United. It is the largest race-pay disparity in the United States that the group found in its research.

“The Bay Area has much better policies for restaurant workers than anywhere else — higher minimum wages, paid sick days at city and state level … and San Francisco, for example, has the health insurance law,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of ROC. “But we haven’t simultaneously made efforts toward (solving) racial inequality.”

The report, conducted by the Bay Area chapter of the ROC, was funded by the Ford Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, University of California and others. It drew from worker surveys, interviews and other industry and government data.

Bay Area cities have some of the highest minimum wages in the country. Emeryville has the highest at $14.82 per hour, followed by San Francisco’s wage of $13, Oakland at $12.55 and Berkeley at $12.53.

But with tips on top of those minimum wages, front-of-house restaurant workers, including servers and bartenders, can bring in an income far above the minimum, leaving cooks, dishwashers and other back-of-house employees who do not receive tips trailing far behind.

The problem is that restaurant positions are highly segregated by race, according to the study. While white workers make up less than one-quarter of the restaurant work force overall, they make up 55 percent of bartender positions and 35 percent of serving positions.

The same is true for gender dynamics when it comes to one of the best-paying jobs in the industry: While women make up the majority of servers and bartenders overall, including servers in fine-dining restaurants (which often have tabs at $40 or more per customer), they are underrepresented among bartenders in fine dining.

Women made up 66.7 percent of all restaurant servers, according to the ROC survey, at restaurants where a customer orders from a menu, known as full-service, and 85.7 percent of servers in fine dining. But women comprise only 22.8 percent of restaurant bartenders, and were not represented at all among the high-paying, fine-dining bartender positions.

Fine dining, which usually offers the highest-paying jobs for workers, is where some of the widest gaps in pay were reported. Among those surveyed across all restaurants, men earned a median of $15.76 and women a median of $14.50 per hour.

In fine dining, men had a median wage of $19.66 compared with $16.32 per hour for women. Restaurant workers in fine-dining establishments also reported the widest gap in earnings between white workers (who earn a median of $22.44 per hour) and workers of color, who earned a median hourly wage of $16.32.

The report references a lack of formal training and hiring practices, something that nonprofits, advocacy groups and cities are starting to work on.

ROC will open a restaurant and training center next year called Restore Oakland, where it will be able to train “hundreds of workers of color,” Jayaraman said. It has already begun training programs for workers that include building skills for higher-paying restaurant jobs, but the organization works to educate and incentivize employers and consumers around the issue, too.

Jayaraman said she is advocating for policies to spur employers to desegregate their restaurants, and the ROC has put together a dining guide that lets consumers know what restaurants fare well when it comes to good labor policies.

Restaurant industry group the Golden Gate Restaurant Association works with public and private job-training programs that focus on communities of color, said the association’s executive director, Gwyneth Borden.

The GGRA is also involved in a partnership that includes the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Neighborhood Access Centers and City College to host two-week culinary boot camps in San Francisco. Two boot camps have happened, and the city is looking to expand the program because of its success, Borden said.

She was also quick to point out that the restaurant industry is not unique in this issue.

“As a country, we struggle with racial and gender bias, so no industry is immune to this,” Borden said. “Many restaurants are owned by women, immigrants and people of color as the restaurant industry is one of great opportunity where people can start at the bottom and become owners or move to a new country and share the culture of their birth country.”

Part of the solution, Jayaraman said, “is ensuring workers of color have the skills, comfort level and confidence to even apply for these jobs. At some of these fine dining places opening in uptown Oakland or San Francisco, they are made uncomfortable walking in the door because they aren’t seeing anyone like them.”

That is something that some restaurant owners are already working to change. Chef Octavio Diaz recently opened his Mexican restaurant Agave in uptown Oakland, at the base of the diversity-focused tech incubator and nonprofit, Kapor Center for Social Impact.

“There is a lot of diversity in the restaurant,” Diaz said, noting that he wants to have a diverse, open-minded staff. He said he also plans to increase access to the hospitality industry by starting an internship for students in high school or college to learn the restaurant business.

Annie Sciacca joined the Bay Area News Group in 2016 and covers Contra Costa County. She has written for Bay Area newspapers and magazines on topics including business, politics, economics, education, crime and public safety. Have a tip? Reach Annie at 925-943-8073 or by email at asciacca@bayareanewsgroup.com. You can also send her an encrypted text on Signal at 925-482-7958.

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